Why Your Muay Thai Dreams Might Not Come True in Thailand – The Two Great Fears for Fighting

(above) my video introduction the common fight fears of gassing out and shin pain, the video below shows Den talking about what to do for fight conditioning

Some Tough Talk

One of the advantages of training non-stop in Thailand for so long is a sense of perspective I’ve gained on people who come with Muay Thai dreams. I’ve met maybe 100 people over the past year and a half who have come through the gym with serious aspirations to fight. They arrive very enthused, but less than a quarter of them actually do fight and none of them – not a single one so far – has fought how much they dreamed they would or to their capacity, which is sad because these persons absolutely can do as they dream. The main reason they end up not following their fighting dream is fear. And even when some come here to fight “many times,” they end up fighting much less than they had perhaps pictured in their minds’ eye it’s largely out of laziness and failing to make the effort toward becoming who they think they are, or would like to be in their minds.

Here’s the thing: it’s difficult to get to Thailand and much easier to be in Thailand. I love that people are writing to me from around the globe with aspirations to come to Thailand to train and fight for both short and (even better) long periods of time, but it is a damn shame when all the work that went into getting here isn’t respected by all the work that goes into being here.

Of all the different individuals I’ve talked to who are thinking about fighting, even those who have fought before but not in Thailand, the two greatest fears most often expressed to me are: 1) gassing out; and 2) the pain of shin-to-shin contact. The short response to these fears are: 1) if you are in reasonable shape it’s impossible to gas out in the duration of a single fight; your mind gives up before your body does and if put to it anyone can get through the 10-15 minutes that compose a fight (if you just breathe). And 2) you will not feel the pain on your shins during a fight. Adrenaline is an incredible thing and, while you might have pain from any variety of impacts to your person, you don’t experience itas pain. You just won’t care.

The Importance of Running

But there are longer answers to both of these fears, also. Master K told me from the very beginning, long before fighting was even on the table, that “if you don’t run, you can’t do Muay Thai.” Honestly, I didn’t appreciate that fully until I started fighting and even more so until I started watching fights up close and live. Watch any fight at all and you can see who has done their roadwork and who hasn’t. There’s nowhere to hide in Muay Thai fights. So running is one of the most important parts of training for a fight. If you’re going to come to Thailand, I recommend you start running before you get here, to build up a base and to reenforce self-motivation. If you are already running, run more. Training in the west is just very different from training full-time in Thailand – most people in the west have jobs or school or kids or all of the above and aren’t spending 2-4 hours at a time, twice per day, six days per week. It’s going to be hard when you get here and it’s going to be uncomfortable. You will absolutely grow as a fighter and as a person through the experience of training at a Thai gym, but not passively – you have to be engaged in the training and you have to actually train. So many people come here, train hard a few times with big dreams and then become overwhelmed and end up just training a few times per week. Know that it will be difficult and more importantly that it stays difficult; but you can do it – when you push through it you get better and confidence eats the fear. Be patient with yourself, but be persistent.

(above) Den of Lanna Muay Thai, talking about getting into condition for a fight. He says to give him two weeks.

Shin Pain – the Answer

With all that time at the gym you’re going to be kicking bags, kicking pads and sparring with shinguards, all of which will help condition your shins. But what’s more important than the pre-fight conditioning is actually the post-fight (and post-training) care, something that a lot of folks simply don’t know about and so they neglect it out of ignorance. A lot of guys I meet out here think that just resting the sore and knotted shins by not kicking on them is the way to heal up and that’s simply not enough, in fact it delays healing. You whack a hard bag, or hit the edge of a hard pad the wrong way in your first few days and it can really set you back mentally if you don’t figure out how to recover and/or train around it. The same goes for those who want to fight more than once. I got a hematoma at the bottom of my right shin, on the side down by my ankle, from a fight in the US long before this move to Thailand and it lasted for four months because I did not treat it. Four months! It was squishy and full of fluid and painful for the whole time and I couldn’t really kick on it. If I knew then what I know now about treating shins after fights, I would have had a very different experience of that injury I would have been able to kick on it within 2 weeks in all likelihood. And it’s simple: use hot water massage to draw fresh blood to the area and speed recovery. Western guys out here just stop kicking and end up being “out” for weeks and sometimes a month or more at a time often resulting in a fear of fighting again. If they would just treat the shins they could be back much faster and less afraid of re-injury in the next fight. This is a very important component for both those starting to train with the ambition to fight, or for someone who hopes to fight multiple times.

Related to shin pain, for a new-comer is the toughness of the bottom of your feet. You will be training on either cement or rug-burn prone carpet, but even if your chosen gym has mats the heat and humidity can make even the better fabrics of mats and the canvas of rings very hard on the feet. If you can, walk barefoot for several weeks before you get to Thailand. And once here you may have to tape your feet, (I had to) and deal with toe-bangs, peeling skin on the tops of your feet and blisters from running. It’s pretty unavoidable as part of the initial toughening of Thai camps, but the above are ways to ease the the transition. You will be injured in small ways – pretty much all the time. Learn to recover, and learn to not let it weaken your resolve.

Owning Your Training

I think a common fantasy is that coming to Thailand and training at a Thai camp will transform you into a hardened, skilled fighter without exception. That’s unfortunately not the case and to fantasize this way is like having a conveyer-belt that runs in the “input” end of a machine and you come out a ninja on the “output” end without ever seeing what goes on within the machine all through the middle. That’s where all the hard work is. Thai culture is very non-confrontational and while there is a level of intensity at camps that is “bootcamp-like” in a sense, as paying customers westerners will not be submitted to the kind of intensity and, in some senses, the brutality of “authentic” Thai training. Some gyms will run something like classes where everyone does the same things, but most won’t. You are largely responsible for yourself, so own your training and respect yourself enough to work hard, show enthusiasm and intent to learn so that Thais know that you are a worthy investment. And ask for help, technique, suggestions, training tips, etc. You cannot be passively transformed into a fighter and you get out what you put in. It is incredibly easy to waste time in training – you can do that anywhere in the world, so do yourself a favor and don’t do it here.

Exhaustion for Two Weeks

If you train hard, with patience and commitment, you will be exhausted. You will sleep almost all the time between training sessions and for the first few weeks you might be crashing midway through your dinner. This is absolutely normal – in fact, I still sleep a great deal after a year and a half of doing this non-stop. But the first two-weeks is the most difficult. When I told Kaensak that I was moving to Thailand to fight the second thing he said to me was, “sleep a lot.” This is a man who lived Muay Thai as a way of life for his whole life; it doesn’t go away. You will feel like there is something wrong with you, but there isn’t. You will sleep like a dead man. After 10 to 14 days you will come out of this much, much stronger, and your sleep patterns will be more normal and you might have more energy for other activities during the midday break in training. But you cannot train “like a Thai” and go out partying at night. It’s not possible.

The Party Scene

Thailand is Disneyland for adults and persons who want to come here have a number of different fantasies about what it will be like and what s/he will be like. Some people come here for an extended “Spring Break” type vacation and can eat up an incredible amount of time and money doing this. What’s difficult to see is how many guys come here with the fantasy of training and fighting “like a Thai” and then once they have their first fight they either go on the reward-center binge of not training and eating/drinking whatever they want because they feel they were “good” while preparing for their fight, or the fear of pain or gassing out causes stress and they end up segueing into the Farang cafe/party scene even before their fight. Their intentions of training and fighting become only verbal tokens whereas their actions are almost entirely in the ethic of vacationing. It’s hard to see this happen, and at such great frequency, because it is disrespectful of a true Muay Thai gym space.

One of the difficulties about living the Muay Thai dream is that you will find a fair amount of Farang who also came with a Muay Thai dream, but now are staying more or less in a soft orbit around the gym. Most of them have had problems with the fears of gassing out or shin pain at some point and have largely adopted a vacation lifestyle, while still connected to the gym. As you look around you to get your bearings you may naturally begin to feel that it is normal to just let go of your Muay Thai ambitions, and settle into how most longer-term Farang are. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making your stay in Thailand more of a vacation than a Muay Thai journey, not one bit. Everyone finds their level and pursues what they wish. But know in advance that if the most important thing to you is your Muay Thai experience it can very easily become something you didn’t originally intend. The idea of fighting gets pushed further and further into the future, you train less often, you keep telling yourself that you just want to get into shape first but refuse to take responsibility for actually working hard to get into shape. It becomes the waiting game and it never, never leads to “ready.”

You Are Never Fight Perfect

One is never 100% for a fight. Projecting some future state where you are going to be in great condition, or all your body parts will be free from pain is most often just a cocoon of self-delay. My husband and I joke that whenever I get injured in training – and I probably have been injured more in training that in my fights – we know that at least I’m training right. Training involves injury. And training involves getting tired. There is no magical state in the future where either of these things stops being the case. Some days you have more energy than others, some days you have less pain than others, and some days you feel like everything is “clicking” and some days you feel worthless. It is part of the beauty of Muay Thai. Fighting is part of training, it isn’t a separate affair. If you have a Muay Thai dream, the time to fight is soon. Your trainers will tell you if you aren’t ready, but at Lanna where they have experienced thousands of westerners, if you come in reasonable shape and are trained in enough skills to block and attack, largely they think they can have you ready to fight in 2 to 3 weeks. And to avoid the eternal delay, I always say to those hoping to have a fight while here: “plan to fight twice; not only once.” It changes your motivations and expectations; it takes the pressure off of just one fight and it gets you back to training rather than directly into the revolving door of reward/recovery. The hurdles to fighting in Thailand are not primarily physical. They are almost entirely mental.

I’m Not Advocating That You Be Me

I’m not telling you to be like me. I may have fought more times in Thailand this year than almost any other Farang, male or female, in this time frame – and that’s because I want to, not because of any kind of “should.” Everyone has their own priorities and their own dreams. My particular dream is to get absolutely as good as I can in the short time I have here in Thailand. You very likely have a different dream, a unique one. But what I’m saying is to identify and be real about your dreams and priorities, and to take ownership and guardianship of those dreams in order to act on them. It has been difficult to watch maybe a 100 people come with beautiful thoughts about themselves, hopes for a kind of experience, but to see them fall back. Sometimes it happens because they aren’t prepared mentally for what it will be like, sometimes it’s because they don’t know how to deal with things like treating pain, and sometimes it’s because they don’t have the right support. Sometimes it happens though because they realize they wanted to do something else, like relax – like how summer vacation felt when you were still a kid and had no responsibilities or obligations. I just want to just give fair warning to those who have Muay Thai dreams that you really can do it… you can. But it isn’t going to be easy.

It happens a lot at the gym that persons who clearly love Muay Thai, who have some degree of dedication to it and are willing and eager to train, pay me an odd compliment. They ask me how I can train so hard. It’s in how they ask it, with a small suggestion of defeat underneath it, a betrayal of the difficulty they’re feeling in themselves and the misguided assumption that I’m making it look easy. I tell them the secret every time, right away: it never gets easy, you just get better. I do this every day, that’s why I can do it – I’m not special, I’m just accustomed to the pain, the fatigue, the difficulties; and I’m passionate, so I accept these things as part of the art and part of the experience of growth. In life we all have things that never get easier. School doesn’t get easier. Work doesn’t get easier. Being responsible doesn’t get easier. But what happens is that our mental attitude about such things change and you just keep going, and you find joy instead of looking for “easy.” Your Muay Thai dream is going to be like that. It’s harder than you think it is going to be, but you’re stronger than you think you are. It isn’t going to get easier – you just get better. But if you work through it your mental attitude will get to a more beautiful place. That, maybe above all else, is what the Thais have to teach others about Muay Thai.

My friend Pook shared a quote on her Facebook page the other day that I think applies to the value we offer to ourselves and those around us: “A comfort zone is is a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there.”

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A 103 lb. (46 kg) female Muay Thai fighter. Originally I trained under Kumron Vaitayanon (Master K) and Kaensak sor. Ploenjit in New Jersey. I then moved to Thailand to train and fight full time in April of 2012, devoting myself to fighting 100 Thai fights, as well as blogging full time. Having surpassed 100 fights in 3 years here, my new goal is to fight an impossible 200 times in Thailand, as much as I possibly can, and to continue to write my experience.

15 Comments

ADouble

December 13, 2013 10:59 pm

Great post. You present a lot of good information, and I really like the comfort-zone quote. I know I’m going to use that quote it in the future.

I think you missed one thing tough. I have noticed that when I am tense or nervous, I sometimes hold my breath when doing a technique. A person is going to get gassed quickly if they are holding their breath for half of the fight. I suspect that this can happen if someone is nervous during a fight. So, I would add that an important part of not gassing is relaxing and making sure that you exhale on strikes and blocks.

I notice that you say “westerners will not be submitted to the kind of intensity and, in some senses, the brutality of “authentic” Thai training”. But surely the whole reason for going to Thailand is to experience exactly that?

I started boxing when I was 11 and looked forward to every fight. I soon learned that you can take a lot of pain and injury during a fight and barely notice it. The next day you’d feel it. I can’t count the number of times when I asked myself why am I doing thus crazy sport. But every time, after a few days, I couldn’t wait for the next fight.

Our school PE teacher was an ex-army boxer who was very good at the boot camp side of training. He was a great believer in frequent fights, usually more than once a week, sometimes more than once a day, and injury wasn’t an excuse. Some people thought he was “brutal” but others (including me) really appreciated the great start that he gave us in the best of all sports.

:I notice that you say ‘westerners will not be submitted to the kind of intensity and, in some senses, the brutality of “authentic” Thai training’. But surely the whole reason for going to Thailand is to experience exactly that?”

This is an effect of the complicated hierarchy of Thai culture and society. I think westerners kind of fantasize about the Kung-Fu Movie training sequence where you show up and have to earn your way from making your master’s tea to having to pull your final punch in sparring against him, all throughout a short montage sequence. It’s just not like that. Thai kids experience something kind of like this when they start young in that they have no standing, just bottom-rung-of-the-social-ladder status. The new kid, Not, is 16 years old and as the youngest and newest he has been sweeping the floor, acting as servant to the trainers and the older, more established boys, etc. He didn’t get pads held for him for probably a whole month when he first arrived – he just had to train himself on the bag and occasionally get tossed around by me in clinch/spar practice. But Thai kids have years to alter their status. Either new kids come and you get status by default by being older, more established, etc., or you just work hard and become a good investment for the gym but you’re still kind of the grunt until someone arrives who is under you.

Westerners simply don’t experience this kind of thing. As paying customers we don’t start out with zero status and commercial gyms are trying to accommodate western sensibilities – or what they can guess or understand about western sensibilities – as best they can. So westerners in most gyms aren’t made to sweep the floor or flogged with a switch for bad technique the way Thai kids might be when they first start out. And even the westerners who have fantasized about the Kung-Fu montage don’t actually want to relinquish themselves to the gym. You tell them to do 100 pushups in the “bootcamp” style and the westerner might do it, but he might skip the next day of training, do fewer rounds because he feels tired, or actually tell the trainer he doesn’t feel like it that day so he’s going to skip the pushups. Thai kids don’t have that option. This is what I mean by not being submitted to the intensity and brutality of “authentic” Thai training. We just don’t have the consequences or social positions that Thais have in this way of life. And for women it’s even more complicated.

Sylvie.
Thanks for that further explanation of what you meant. It’s much clearer to me now. I guess that’s it’s partly that westerners are perceived as being soft, and partly that westerners just aren’t there for long enough. You, of course are an honorable exception to both of those rules.

One thing you said was familiar to me. You said Thai kids might be “flogged with a switch for bad technique”. I started boxing at an English private school at a time when the cane was used routinely to “encourage” discipline and that included failing to fight hard enough, or pausing when doing your pushups That sounds pretty Spartan now, but it seemed quite normal at the time. It certainly made you resilient (or better, anti fragile). Almost as good as learning in Thailand in fact.

You must have fans all round the world who admire your determination to do things the hard way. Quite a role model for soft westerners. I’d say.

Tough talk and serious–I can see it making some “dreamers” uncomfortable, causing others to re-evaluate what it is they really want, and helping immensely those who might fall by the wayside simply through ignorance make it through to the other side. Well done, Sylvie.

Great stuff Sylvie! Training and fighting in Thailand is often glamorized by most people who do it when in reality it’s hard work every single day. Just because you’re in Thailand doesn’t automatically make you a fighter, yet some people think it does. I love the honesty of your piece, people who are looking to fight in Thailand should read this to get their expectations right!

So true, all of it. It never gets easier. I’ve been here nearly a year, and it only gets harder. You push yourself harder, your trainers and sparring partners push you harder. You improve. You wonder why you’re still here, but you can’t imagine leaving. Don’t ever expect it to be easy. If it’s easy, you’re not training hard enough.

Right on with the “owning your training” section. “Party Scene” was interesting too.

I didn’t come to Thailand to fight. I came to Thailand to train muaythai, to focus solely on a physical activity I love for a few months. I have never had much interest in fighting, just on a personal level. I respect those who do, but it’s just not really who I am. I came to Thailand with an open mind, wondering what I would find here. I planned to stay only 3 months but now I’m one month away from my one-year “anniversary.” In that time, I’ve found that I’m much more interested in learning Thai language and reading about/ writing about/ observing life in a muaythai camp from a sociological/ anthropological perspective, than in fighting. This is how I’ve always been. Ever since I was a child, I always gravitated to books about other cultures, and was always convinced that when I grow up I would learn like 5 different languages (Thai would be my fourth, so I’m on the way, YES!). I have come to find that life in general doesn’t change you as much as makes you more of who you have always been. When you put yourself in a totally foreign environment like a muaythai gym in a country you have no background in (I’m Ukrainian-American, not Thai-American), you begin to see who you are reflected back at you. Do you try to immerse yourself in the culture, learn the language, spend time with the Thais at the gym more than with people who speak your native language? Or do you spend most of your time with the other foreigners and develop closer bonds with them? Do you relax and party? Or do you try to show up to every session no matter how god-awful you may feel? Do you train to fight? Do you train for fitness? Do you train just for the joy of it? Do you socialize or do you keep to yourself? What are you looking for? Did you find what you were looking for in the muaythai life or did you find something else?

It’s a unique journey for everyone, just as everyone is on a different path. I think, though, that an extended stay at a muaythai gym can teach you humility and resilience, if you let it. That’s regardless of whether you fight. If you have conflict within yourself, or conflict with your gym-mates (I have had both), that’s where the growth happens. As Sylvie said, ain’t nothing growin’ in the comfort zone.

It HURTS, all of it. Your body, your mind, your life. It all hurts. But it also feels so good. You can’t imagine anything else bringing this out in you, all your joy, all your rage, all your passion. It’s all you want. Think of muaythai like how you would think of being in love.

I think you’re right on in terms of the intensity of experience in Thailand kind of amplifying who you are already. Although, I do argue that people who come here have a tendency to act out in ways that they would not in their own culture, treating it like an extended “Spring Break” that you’d see on MTV or something. There’s something about being in a strange place and in a different culture that invites a kind of “freedom” of whatever one keeps constrained in their own society. It’s beautiful in some ways and messy in others. It’s what allows people to feel so free out here and it’s not necessarily always acting out like a total jerk, but it sometimes is. I’m certainly awarded incredible freedoms in who I am by being able to train full time and fight as often as I do, so aspects of who I am are able to come out that would be more repressed in a 9-5 working environment.

Frankly, I find myself training less hard in Thailand than I did in Japan. In Japan, everybody who came to the gym had their game face on, every night six times a week, and the collective energy just made you work harder than you already did.

Here, on the other hand, half the people seem to just want to have a good time and they change the mood at the gym. No “Thai treatment” either – the one time a Thai trainer threw me hard in sparring the others went mental on him for throwing a woman… I guess they don’t think my opponent will throw me in a fight? One of the things I wanted to learn was clinching, yet I only get to clinch maybe three times a week. It’s frustrating to no end.

And then I get self-conscious about wanting to do more, like staying on to knee the bag while everybody else has already started stretching. I want to work hard, but it’s infinitely more difficult when there is a social pressure to take it easy. I guess I just came to the wrong gym (for me).

This is interesting; I’ve heard a few guys come through my gym up North and say that in the US they trained so much harder, but for one hour a few times per week. Like, it was more “concentrated” with less aimlessness between things. I always attributed that to their not knowing how to work by themselves and the camp being pretty unstructured. But that’s not your case, as you’re very self-driven.

It’s so frustrating to want more and be put in the very uncomfortable position of a) having to request that others put in effort to help you and b) to feel like you’re kind of putting them out with such a request. But the only way you actually get experience is by actually putting in the time, which for things like clinching and sparring require someone else to share that time and effort. You can’t just stick yourself on a bag.

The social pressure to “take it easy” is something I’ve experienced in a variety of ways, but pretty consistently, throughout my time here. It’s been mostly trainers telling me not to train so hard, or to not train so hard all the time. And I think that in some of those situations it was my disposition, rather than my actual work-rate, that provoked these criticisms. If I’d worked exactly as hard but had a “lighter” attitude, I don’t think it would have been such a concern… I also suspect if I were a man I wouldn’t have gotten such flack either. But I don’t know; men don’t train very hard at the gyms I’ve been to. There is a degree to which the “sabai, sabai” attitude of Thai gyms is all about keeping everything relaxed in attitude and making sure it’s something you can do on a twice-daily basis, a way to avoid the “burn out” of our western conceived “fight camps” that last 6-8 weeks, peak with the fight and then lead to weeks or months of hedonism. In my own case, I’ve refused to be pulled back by laziness at my gyms or by trainers telling me to take it down a little. I just let them get used to the fact that this rate isn’t over-zealousness that can’t be maintained. When they see that it keeps going, they kind of get on board to try to shape it or direct it, which has been incredibly beneficial here in Pattaya.

Dear Sylvie
I’m flying to Thailand soon to train and fight Muay Thai and I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your words. They are going to be very valuable to me. If I may ask you for an additional advise: Can you recommend a gym in Bangkok where committed girls can sparr and clinch with both female and male fighters of all levels during training? I would like to avoid being put in the corner and only asked for sparring if there is another foreigner girl around… All my best wishes and respect to you,
Lea

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File this under The Culture of Muay. If you are to understand Muay Thai, I mean really understand it and see how it grew out of Thai society, and the forces that sustain and feed it today, you have to appreciate Fight Culture. It is not just the techniques and gyms that make up Muay Thai in Thailand, but rather a whole system of beliefs and experiences the pull together the karma and excitements of gambling – gambling on contests of body and soul. Part 1 on the Battle Beetles of the North is here: Muay Thai Clinch is Not

Sylvie’s Tips – Muay Thai Techniques

“Play Knees” – Sylvie’s Tips video above The other day I put up a video of “play knees,” bagwork that Muay Thai legend Sakmongkol taught me at WKO, here in Pattaya. He was displeased with me merely doing counted, repetition knee drills, the traditional Muay Thai camp endless knees on the bag that everyone knows. (These are still good and useful, by the way, just for stamina.) He wanted me to do play knees, to move the bag around in fight simulation action and energy. It was something I’ve never seen before, but I did my best to adopt it.

How to Crush the Head and Neck Kru Nu’s son Bank has a terribly strong squeeze in the clinch, and ends up just crushing me most of the time when we practice. He just turned 14 and earlier this year began his Lumpinee career. So today I asked him to show me the hand position he uses, and learned that all this time I’ve been doing it backwards, leveraging with the wrong arm, and wrongly using the face of my wrist instead of the blade of my forearm. You are basically crushing the opponent’s forehead into your own shoulder, with

Below is a long technique vlog, basically explaining an adjustment I’ve made to my training in the last couple of weeks. Usually my training consists of things that promote my conditioning and lots of work focused on specific techniques that I want to develop. These can be techniques or tactics I’ve picked up from legends while filming my Muay Thai Library project, or things I already do that I think I should sharpen up for my particular fighting style. I’m always working on something and it’s always hard, always with the aim of development. As with all training regimes, repetition is

We got a question on the Muay Thai Roundtable forum the other day that I reckon is a pretty common issue. When I first started taking Muay Thai from Master K, he described the teep as the “electric fence” around every other technique. Teep comes first, basically – the first line of defense and keeping your opponent out of your space until you want them there. And I sucked at teeping for a really long time. It’s only fairly recently, in the last 1.5 years maybe, that my teep has become a favorite technique, and it didn’t become that way because

This is a new feature I’m going to try my hand at. I’ve got a lot on my plate out here, but it feels like it would be a shame to waste some of the small technical Muay Thai know-hows I’ve run into, so I’m going to try to stop and film them in short segments when I come across a new one. Sometimes it will be something I’ve discovered in my own struggle to synthesize all the amazing technique that is surrounding me, but mostly I hope it is short pieces of instructions or help from those teaching

The cloth training wraps that are so common in the West aren’t necessarily all over the place in Thailand. You can buy them at virtually any shop that sells equipment, sure, but they’re not used by all the Thais training at the camps. A lot of Thai boys don’t wrap their hands at all. Those who do, in my experience, often favor these cloth “fight” wraps that are more like gauze-linen and don’t have a thumb loop or Velcro. The western boxing style training cloth wraps we’re used to are expensive and, the more I’ve trained, the more they seem

Sylvie’s Tips: The Floating Block Sakmongkol was the first person to tell me not to turn around on kicks. He was adamant about it. It’s very awkward when you first try and your kick can be really flicky and horrible, but the more you get it under control the more you realize how much this increases power. Basically you want to have confidence that you can control your kick at any time, so if you miss your target you’re not going to spin all the way around. Honestly, you’ll seldom if ever see this in a Thai fight and when

In my Dieselnoi Instruction post I made a video demonstrating some of the different sorts of knees used in Muay Thai. I’m not an expert in any of these, but I felt it might be good to just present an overview as a single, “proper” knee does not so much exist in Muay Thai, and there are many different techniques used for different purposes. Sometimes the focus is damage done, or accumulating points, or even just making sure the knee is clearly visible to the judges. As I say in the introduction to the video, these are all variations on knees and,

a cross position and slash motion on the arm swing The Muay Thai Kick Arm Swing Angle One of the things you learn when you come to Thailand longer term is that there are many, many ways of doing something. You may have learned that there is “one” way, or been corrected away from a “wrong” way, and this is not necessarily a bad thing, but technique in Thailand is developed somewhat individually, over a long period of time, influenced by different styles and elements from trainers. It is not uncommon to be corrected in different directions by different trainers,

This post is in the spirit of this site, showing things in progress, as if passing reading notes so others can think along (and even train along) with me. I’ve thought a lot about this clinch since first witnessing it about 3 years ago. I’ve finally gotten myself to the position where I can teach it to myself. I first wrote about Tanadet (Poda) 2 years ago. The extended film clip below Kevin made as a study film for me, so I could figure out just what it is that Tanadet was doing. If you want a very good sense

This above is a little video help to Benjamin who wrote me about a basic problem he was having in sparring. It seemed like the best way to answer him was in a quick video. I try to help people who write in to me as best I can. Once I filmed it I realized that this is something a lot of others are probably having issues with. I know I still run into it after 3 years here, so I thought to turn it into a “Sylvie’s Tips” video. Hopefully it helps others. Benjamin asked about how his knee

n Sylvie’s Tips I try to capture on video various small techniques that I run into while training. The way that it happens in Thailand, things are seldom taught to you in the form of formal instruction, rather they come up suddenly in training and then are gone. I’m pretty shy, so it’s hard actually go around and request these things; I don’t want to stop everyone and have them repeat things for the camera. In this case though we arrived at O. Meekhun gym to find organized instruction being given to Phetjee Jaa and one of the boys named

This is a deceptively simple way to close distance. I get interesting communication from readers and fans. When it’s brief, I’ll answer directly. Mostly I try to get folks to post their questions on the Muay Thai Roundtable forum so it can help others who might have the same questions and more people can chime in to help with answers; but in this case the question was one I’ve not only worked hard to develop a strategy on, as a smaller fighter, but it’s also one that I’ve heard a few times. So it makes sense to do a Sylvie’s

Some of My Best Posts

I’ve written before about how Muay Thai and fighting, to me, isn’t “violence.” My argument was that I have experienced real violence, the above is the story of my rape as a child, and that the consent and preparation involved in fighting isn’t the same. There is, however, a flavor of violence in Muay Thai – it is, as my old boxing coach Ray Valez would say, “the hurt business” and ultimately any fighter pushing for the highest form of the art of Muay Thai has to embrace this. Yesterday there was a young woman at my gym, Petchrungruang, who

I just had to do my annual visa run, which requires sitting in a van full of total strangers for the 11 hour drive up to the border with Laos, an overnight stay, then the 11 hour drive back down to Pattaya. It’s grueling. Sitting in a car or a plane for this number of hours takes a toll on anyone. It’s astonishing how tired sitting on your ass makes you. I’m not very social, so I always put as many hours of podcasts and audio books as possible on my player so I can leave my headphones in the

Apologies to my younger readers, this post is laced with profanity. Sometimes profanity has a special power to describe things in ways other words can’t. The plastic stool underneath me is too far out from the actual corner and my body kind of tips backwards as my cornermen lift my legs into their hands and rub icy cold water on my thighs and shins. I try to balance myself on the ropes but it’s more awkward and I reposition my forearms to the tops of my thighs; the cold water is going over my head now, which feels nice because

This article is about the flourishing Muay Thai of Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand, becoming the best female fight city in the country and very possibly in the entire world. No other city boasts such a complete native female Thai fight scene: it’s fed by side-bet (gambling) fights in the outlying provinces, stabilized by Sports Schools, hosted at a large number of local stadia (all of which allow women to fight in them) which hold fights every night of the week, and supported by the Thai Muay Siam media coverage. If you are a female Muay Thai fighter, this

Stephan Fox is the General Secretary of the International Federation of Muaythai Amateur (IFMA) and the Vice-President of the World Muaythai Council (WMC). He is a huge figure in the recognition and development of amateur Muaythai in Thailand, as well as international competition with both the IFMA and WMC. After 20 years of work, the International Olympic Committee has just given provisional recognition for possible inclusion in the Olympics – let me repeat that: 20 years of work for that, and Mr. Fox’s response is, “right on schedule.” above, the full 30 minute interview with Stephan Fox We cover a range of

What follows is not authoritative, it is just the things I’ve gleaned in my nearly 5 years of full time training at my various gyms, and in traveling around and taking privates from some of the best in Thailand. You can get access to my growing Muay Thai library with legends for a suggested pledge of $5. I read a rant on Reddit that, despite its intense language, does open up that some people do get frustrated training in Thailand, finding a lack of instruction and padwork that be repetitive. I do believe there is no better place in the

Alex and Note are standing on opposite corners of the ring, wearing shinguards and gloves, hanging out like they’re about to do anything other than sparring. They’re totally relaxed, laughing, joking. Kru Nu is pacing around and there’s a buzz around the circumference of the ring while the remainder of the boys all takes their positions along the ropes as spectators and Goh – one of the padmen for the kids – is hollering for Chicken Man. Kru Nu squats down with his hands on the top rope, peering under the staircase and out into the chicken farm, the most likely

First off, let me say it: weight, its not that big of a deal. There is a strong caveat to this, which is that it is a definite advantage, but so is height, or knowing the scoring system, or fighting since you were 10, or having a fight on your home turf, and so many other things. So while weight is always a potential advantage, it is just one among many possible advantages. You can beat people who have the weight advantage over you, just like you can with any of those other advantages. I know that in the West

read my guest post articles a Husband’s Point of View A Husband’s Point of View – Consider this a working theory. I’ve written about the uniqueness of Thai style training before, in The Slow Cook vs the Hack, and this article can be seen as something of an extension of that. But as Sylvie’s husband watching her progress through very earnest training and a hell of a lot of fighting, and seeing numerous westerners come through her Thai gyms, I’ve come upon something I think is pretty important. What led me to this is a very particular quality many serious

Below is meant to be a helpful guide, something that I wish I had when I first came to training Thailand. These are just things I’ve noticed in my 4 years of training and fighting here and are not hard and fast rules to follow. If you want to be polite in Thailand gyms, in a culture that is different than your own, these are just a few things to look for. There are of course a wide variety of gym experiences in Thailand, and things that are impolite in a small, family Thai-style gym might very well be common

A lot of us feel that aggression comes with an “on/off” switch, and that we should be able to flick it back and forth based on context. Many of us who are learning Muay Thai struggle with aggression, perhaps because we don’t feel that we are “naturally aggressive,” and it’s frustrating to watch those who are seemingly naturally gifted with aggression succeed in ways that we don’t see in ourselves. But aggression isn’t natural, even if it does seem innate in some more than others. I contend that aggression feels natural to some due to having spent years cultivating it before they

First a Little Bit About Daeng Daeng is one of the most fight-focused trainers I’ve trained with. When I was training at Lanna Muay Thai in Chiang Mai, it was Daeng who invested the most in diagnosing and fixing weaknesses in my fighting. He wasn’t my main trainer, but he’s a very good teacher and has a keen eye for finding how to improve on existing strengths and correct errors. I’d initially gotten a bit stuck with a technically brilliant but lazy and unmotivated trainer – that guy was a great trainer for some, just not for me – and Daeng

Join and Study my Muay Thai Library of Legends This is a full video of a private I took with Arjan Surat, Head Coach of the Thai National Team, and owner of the esteemed (but lesser known to the west) Dejrat Gym in Bangkok. I did a short review of the gym when I interviewed female fighter Kaitlin Young, and it was then that I met Arjan Surat for the first time: an absolutely extraordinary teacher and life-force of Muay Thai. The man is Old School-Old School, telling me that he’s been holding pads longer than I’ve been alive (he’s

The Gendered Experience

Preface: I wanted to write on this topic right after reading the Lion Fight interview with Tiffany Van Soest prior to her fight with Caley Reece on the Lion Fight promotion. It ended up taking me longer than I’d expected to make the time to actually sit down and write it. Female fighter and blogger Natasha Sky also was inspired by this same interview (the question of risking beauty was also posed to Caley Reece, facing Van Soest on that card) and she wrote a piece on her blog, including questions to other female fighters on their opinions on this

Ladies, Send in Your Bloodied Face Fighter Photos This is a call for female fighters to send me photos of their own bloodied face, to join a wall of women who have had their faces bloodied in fights. This is really in answer to the absence of the bloodied female face in fight media, something which actively works to segregate women, aesthetically, as something less than “real” fighters. The bloodied male face is celebrated in media; it symbolizes male toughness, aggression, commitment. But to a large degree the female fighter face has been whitewashed in a sea of beauty shots

To begin, these are my observations as a female fighter in Thailand who has pursued learning clinch for 3+ years. Other female fighters may have had other experiences, but difference of experience does not mean that the theme of what I write about here is not true or relevant. It also does not mean that what other women experience, if different, is false – there is room in the world for a plurality of experiences. What I’m writing about here is not meant to scare anyone away from training in Thailand or pursuing clinch with the men in their gyms;

I had lunch with Alicia Nowak yesterday, a young Polish woman who lives and trains Muay Thai in Vienna. We met through my Muay Thai Facebook page and I was surprised as we sat together across a table how easy it was to talk with her, to relate our experiences and struggles with training. It shouldn’t surprise me, as I honestly believe that no matter how different two people are who are training Muay Thai that a great deal of their experiences will be the same, but it was a delightful surprise. I mentioned – almost casually – that

Some people have shown interest in following the story of Angie, the kathoey fighter at my gym Petchrungruang in Pattaya. I interviewed her just before her first ever fight and last night was her second time in the ring. Her first fight ended very quickly in a TKO, when her opponent fell at an awkward angle on her own elbow and was unable to continue. So, a bit of a disappointment in not being able to have a full fight, but for her second fight Angie would be facing a very experienced Thai woman. (Her first fight was against another beginner, who

Growing up in Colorado had innumerate perks that I only came to appreciate long after I took them for granted. City kids in New York and Philadelphia learn how to handle themselves on public transportation from an early age and kids like me in the wilds of mountains and deserts learned how to “pack out what you pack in” with equal diligence. The first rule of backpacking in the mountains of Colorado and deserts of Utah is to leave no trace of yourself, the foremost lesson being to preserve the world you’re exploring. When I was maybe 12 years old

I was having a conversation with an accomplished and very thoughtful female fighter, Mae-Lin Loew of the incredibly well written Loew Factor blog. She was at once applauding me for being so honest and open in my writing, and at the same time kind of wishing she could move more in that direction herself. The subject of social limitations to what might be perceived as self-aggrandizement in blogging came up, and this little portion of my response seemed to stand on its own and say important things, so I duplicate it here: …There’s a lot of sniping and criticism no

I’ve been called a man twice in the past month – something I’ve experienced many times in Thailand and in the past largely read as a mixed insult or at best a backhanded compliment. It’s not unusual in Thailand for people to make blunt comments about your appearance. But these two have been some of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. I’m not ashamed to be a woman, so what’s with the pride in these two instances, what made the difference? And why were these important to me? The first occasion was at Thapae Stadium in Chiang Mai. The night

Power in Modesty? I just read an online article on the topic of Evangelical clothing stores popping up “all over” Brazil. The author is quick to note that Brazil is “known for it’s tiny bikinis,” so there’s some kind of shock expected from the popularity (in number as there is no note on the sales) of these modest clothing stores. The author raises the question, mostly in the title of the article, of whether there is power in modesty. If focus is taken away from the body and how “hot” it looks, can women accomplish more, go farther in

Laurie Berenson is a student of Casey VanBrookhoven in New Jersey, USA. While I’ve never met Laurie, she wrote to me through my Facebook Muay Thai page and it turns out we know and have trained with many of the same people (including Casey, who was a favorite sparring partner for me back in Jersey because, despite his being so much bigger than I am, he sparred hard and made me work for anything I landed). When I first heard from Laurie I was taken by how similar her seemingly-instantaneous affinity for Muay Thai was to my own. Once you

This is a photo of Nam, the wonderful girl I wrote about in Expect the Unexpected two weeks ago. I went to the gym this afternoon (Sunday, “off day”) for some light training in the afternoon and about 20 minutes in a car pulled up. I’d hoped Nam and her sister would be there training again and when the girls spilled out of the car Nam gave me this very excited wave and smiled, saying in English sing-song voice, “Hello!” I asked her how she was and she had to calm down real quick before delivering a perfectly rehearsed, “I’m

In addition to being very committed to training and fighting in Muay Thai as much as I can in Thailand, I also have a deep academic root in me and I revel in exploring abstract concepts and concrete facts that help to better understand one’s place and one’s meaning in the world and the liberties awarded and denied through inclusion and exclusion. Unfortunately there is a dearth of academic study of Muay Thai and even less that is produced in English; the articles that have been written are somewhat dispersed and at times hard to find, so below I’ve compiled

One of the more limiting things as a female Muay Thai fighter is that we have no real history, no archived past to attach ourselves to, to anchor our passion and propel us to greater achievements. We have the names and photos of western women with lots of belts, in recent times, and very few videos, but reach beyond a decade or so and the record of female Muay Thai just falls off into mist. And in terms of Thai female fighters, anything prior to 1998 is extremely obscure and subject to the dubious or incomplete aspects of oral accounts.